1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to automotive safety arrangements, and, more particularly, to passenger safety arrangements including a safety belt for retaining a vehicle occupant on his seat.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Conventional automotive passager safety belts connect or link a vehicle occupant to the vehicle as rigidly and firmly as possible when an accident occurs, so that the high rates of vehicle acceleration or deceleration, which occur in connection with the accident, are transmitted as directly as possible to the occupant. Without such a firm and rigid vehicle occupant control, high relative accelerations between the vehicle and the occupant during an accident would cause severe and often fatal injuries to the occupant as a result of the foreceful impacts of portions of the occupant's body with parts of the vehicle interior.
It has also been found that, in many cases, conventional safety belts could not prevent serious injuries, particularly to the head of the occupant. Extensive tests conducted with dummies having fastened seat belts have evaluated the motions that occur in accidents involving frontal impacts, and it has been found that the relatively freely movable head of a vehicle occupant who is fastened to his seat by a seat belt of the vehicle moves in a rotary motion around the upper portion of the human body, which is retained or kept back by the seat belt when the vehicle is subjected to a rapid deceleration. That motion, which expresses itself as a nodding movement and may be illustrated as a rotation around an axis along the retaining safety belt, starts approximately when the ability of the loaded safety belt to expand or flex is exhausted and the body of the occupant is inflexibly retained by the belt. The nodding motion is often increased by the inherent elasticity of the safety belt, which pulls or yanks the body of the occupant back toward his seat and in a direction opposite that of the acceleration of the head. In any event, the nodding motion of the head increases the speed with which the head of an occupant in the car may strike parts of the vehicle interior, for example, the steering wheel.
It is known to include in the safety belt an impactdampening, flexible intermediate link to prevent the occupant's body from being pulled back. Thereby, the backward pull caused by the elasticity of the safety belt may be, to some extent, eliminated, however, the head of the car's occupant still experiences a severe nodding motion.